Friday, March 30, 2012

Gender Stereotypes in Children's Picture Books


Today I’d like to introduce you an article about gender stereotyping in media, namely children’s picture books. The name of the article is “Gender Stereotyping and Under-representation of Female Characters in 200 Popular Children's Picture Books: A Twenty-first Century Update" by Hamilton and friends (2006). Personally, I believe that how we behave today is conformed by different kinds of media since we were very young. Don’t take me wrong I’m very conventional and absolutely not a feminist, I'm just concerned that what we present to children might harm them.

Previous studies show that sexism in picture books is a bad influence on children’s career interests and strengthen their bias. Some researchers (Tognoli, Pullen, & Lieber, 1994, as cited in Hamilton et al., 2006)) conclude that gender bias in children’s books gives boys a sense of entitlement and lowers girls’ self-esteem and career desires. Other researchers have claimed that children’s literature gives children with social norms of masculinity and femininity. The researchers are concerned about this as parents normally read picture books to their children when they are very young, say 3-5 years old. At that age it is the time that children begin to learn the differences between sexes and of shaping gender stereotypes (Powlishta, Serbin, & Moller, 1993, as cited in Hamilton, 2006). One recent study in 2005 by Anderson and Hamilton (as cited in Hamilton et al., 2006) revealed that the bias is not only against females. For example, as a parent, male is likely to be portrayed as indifferent, stern, and less active with children. If a boy adopts gender role of fathers in may picture books, he might have difficulty communicating with his family in the future. Female in pictures books are portrayed as weak, naive, helpless and modest, and not many of them work outside. This will definitely have impacts on girls' personalities.

Thus, the researchers see the need to further study gender bias and the representation of female and male characters in children’s books in order to prevent harmful effects on their gender roles and self-images. The aim of the study is to assess gender bias in 200 top-selling children’s picture books. Six hypotheses were tested.

The first hypothesis is that there would be fewer female than male in respect of young and adult main and over all characters, titles and pictures.

The second is to test whether sex of author relate to sex of title and main characters.

The third hypothesis is that more female characters would likely to be portrayed indoors than outdoors, passive than active, be rescued, and be caring than male characters.

The fourth one deals with the occupations of the main characters. Both of them would be more gender traditional but male would have wider range of career than would female characters. Also more female than male would be represented as not having an occupation outside home.

The fifth hypothesis is to explore the differences between Caldecott winners and non-award-winning books in the number of male and female characters in all criteria.

The last one is to find out if there are changes in representation and stereotyped genders in children literature since 1980s.

The researchers conducted the research by selecting 30 Caldecott medal winners and honor books during 1995-2001; 155 non award-wining best-selling picture books in 1999-2001; 3 books from New York public Library list of books everyone should know; and the Funorama.com top ten picture books. Overall 200 children books were analyzed in this study.

That brings us to the result. Hypothesis one was confirmed.  However, the hypothesis two was partly confirmed in that male authors wrote more about men in terms of both characters and title characters. Female authors did not favor one sex over the other. Next, hypothesis three was confirmed that more female than male characters are male for nurtures/ cares, but disconfirmed for rescues and to be rescued, passive behaviors, and assertive. In other words, the study found that both male and female characters were represented more often as active than as passive. Hypothesis four which is about characters’ occupation was also confirmed. The fifth finding was that Caldecott books under-represented female characters to a greater extent. Lastly, the study showed that there has been no increase in the proportion of female characters since the 1980s. Anyway, there has been some improvement in the portrayals of woman and men’s active roles as well as job ranges, yet equity is still on the way.

To conclude, this study showed that gender stereotypes are consistently reinforced by children books. Although the idea that boys are more interesting and important than girls persists, not only girls are disadvantageous. Thus, parents, teachers, or librarians should wisely selected books which are less gender stereotyped for the children.



References

Hamilton, MC, Anderson, D, Broaddus, M & Young, K  2006,  Gender Stereotyping and
Under-representation of Female Characters in 200 Popular Children's Picture Books: A Twenty-first Century Update. Sex Roles, 55(11-12), PP. 757-765, viewed 22 March 2012, retrieved from Research Library. (Document ID: 1180950431).




2 comments:

  1. I would hate to agree with you, Dao. Gender stereotyping has been an issue in a lot of circumstances. Most of the parents that I have met gave me the message that "my children is not good at science, because she is a girl." "my son should be better at science than his sister." All these statements have no background reference to how their children have performed in the past; the parents automatically assume that their son should do better in science/math and their daughter does not need to. However, I do believe that this is not something that we may change or have huge influence on in a short time. The stereotyping of genders have been around for centuries and existed in history itself! As teachers, parents, and librarians, it maybe hard for us to choose what materials to give to the children. However, we may guide them to the idea that both genders should be equal and there should be no ability or personality differences.

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    1. Thanks for your comment, Michael!

      I understand what you mean. We cannot choose for children, but we can guide. I agree gender stereotyping is not a threat as long as parents guide the children that all genders are equal.

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